Trick and Tips

Review:
(The ugly portmanteau in the title is because damnable Uplay’s damnable cloud saves system destroyed and rewound over three hours of my progress, which has kept me from getting quite as far into Black Flag as I’d hoped. It also meant I lost a bunch of sea shanties, which was what upset me the most. Is this is Wot I Think? Is it mere Impressions? It’s both and neither. Isn’t that helpful? PS: in the name of all that’s holy, turn off cloud saves in Uplay before you start playing AC4).

It’s the best Assassin’s Creed yet! Which is 90% because Black Flag, a a third-person action adventure about pirates in the Caribbean, isn’t really an Assassin’s Creed game in the traditional sense, and 10% because the lead character is from Swansea.

I went to university in Swansea, you see. It’s a crap town if ever there was one, but I can’t help but be fond of it. Also it’s where I played Half-Life. AC4′s piratey protagonist Edward Kenway has an accent that appears to be on a cycling tour of the British isles, but when it does settle on a Welsh lilt it fits – it fits the rogueish, laddy character, and it fits this much more playful AssCreed. It’s a relief, after the dour AC3. I had thought that game’s joyless hero Connor (Kenway’s grandson, chronologically-speaking) wasn’t going to make any appearance in AC4, but then I realised that the ship’s plank was surely an homage.

Anyway, pirates. I suppose you could argue that they can loosely come under the definition of ‘assassin’, what with all the killing, but let’s not pretend this series has ever had much interest in what that word implies. The secret society and ancestor race bollocks which has made what should have been a light-footed tale tediously heavy is still in some evidence, but the vast majority of it has been downplayed in favour of Just Doing Some Piracy. This also entails an admission, of sorts, of what Assassin’s Creed games are really about – the pursuit of wealth and power, rather than justice and subtlety. This is a game about blowing up every ship that moves for its loot, finding every icon on ever island for its loot and hunting every animal, both on land and at sea, for its skin (i.e. loot). It is greed, it is the celebration of greed, and it is refreshingly unabashed about it. There is a redemptive narrative thread for good ole boy Kenway, whose jack the lad nature decreases somewhat as the game wears on, but really we’re all in it for the yo-ho-ho and the Master and Commander-lite naval battles and blowing up island forts and air-assassinating ocelots (that last is a real in-game mission objective, delivered with an impressively straight face).

While the controls are characteristically convoluted and in some cases discordant (for instance, the run button for on-foot mode becomes the fire cannons! button in ship-captaining mode, which causes no end of trouble), generally it’s a pleasure to take the wheel of Kenway’s ship, the Jackdaw. The naval component is clearly as much like steering a real boat as drinking vodka is like exercising, but even in its cartoonish ease there’s a satisfying weight to turning against the wind, a heft and chaos to unleashing a volley of cannonfire, and a ‘we’re the kings of the world!’ rapture to leading a boarding party onto a defeated enemy craft. When you’re out on the seas, it’s wall to wall destructive celebration. Rad more

System requirements:
Operating System: Windows Vista SP2 or Windows 7 SP1 or Windows 8 (both 32/64bit versions)
Processor: Intel Core2Quad Q8400 @ 2.6 GHz or AMD Athlon II X4 620 @ 2.6 GHz
RAM: 2 GB (4 GB recommended)
Video Card: Nvidia Geforce GTX 260 or AMD Radeon HD 4870 (512MB VRAM with shader Model 4.0 or higher)
DirectX 11: DirectX June 2010 Redistributable 
Disk Space: 30 GB available space
Sound Card: DirectX Compatible Sound Card with latest drivers
Peripherals: Windows-Compatible keyboard and mouse required, optional controller (Xbox 360 Controller for Windows recommended)
Multiplayer: 256 Kbps or faster broadband connection

Screen Shots: Click on the image to view large screen

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